


Man of the hour

by unlovelySara



Category: Mother Love Bone, Pearl Jam
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-11
Updated: 2014-01-11
Packaged: 2018-01-08 09:40:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1131090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unlovelySara/pseuds/unlovelySara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>When he’s in the middle of the ocean and the foam begins to envelop him, frantically bumping into the surfboard and his skin, Eddie looks back at somebody else, someone that he has never met but that he has however learned to know very quickly.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Man of the hour

Eddie is an ocean son: no other element has ever been able to make him be at ease like water can do, and its very infinity doesn’t scare him at all.  
He knows that the ocean won’t betray him: it has always protected him and it’ll continue to do so, until his heart will stop beating.  
From that moment on, Eddie himself will become _the ocean_.

**_Tidal waves don't beg forgiveness  
Crash, then on their way_ **

During the countless afternoons spent in company with his surfboard, Eddie has had the opportunity to think long about what surrounds him and the meanings and importance he gives to the various components of life.  
Furthermore, he likes thinking about the ocean as a metaphor of life itself: there are those who prefer to stroll along the tideland and content themselves with the little water that sinuously slides through their toes, the hotheads who dive headlong – maybe also drinking long sips and almost choking – to come later out with a triumphant manner and the awareness of having lived out all that water has offered them, and then the people who love letting themselves being carried away by the stream and that reach the shore safe and sound, and others who are suddenly engulfed by the waves, and not even the pale shadow of a call for help has been able to come out their mouths.  
The maelstroms are nothing but an aspect of the immense beauty that the ocean can give to those who enter it: the secret lies in not losing oneself in it too much carelessly.  
Givin’ yourself, that’s the exact word.

**_Father, he enjoyed collisions  
Others walked away_ **

While surfing, Eddie always thinks about his father: amongst the waves he has always the pleasant illusion of being able to reach him more easily… _of being closer to him_.  
It almost seems to him that he’s able to touch _his_ eyes, and he can make them collide with his own ones, just a heap of eyelids and salt and eyelashes and tears and foam…  
But when he’s in the middle of the ocean and the foam begins to envelop him, frantically bumping into the surfboard and his skin, Eddie looks back at somebody else, someone that he has never met but that he has however learned to know very quickly.

**_The snowflake falls in May_ **

As the foam usually laps with impetuosity, so Andy used to envelope with the same ardor whoever was taking part to his shows or the conversations he broached with that flowing talkativeness that many people envied him.  
Andy knew he wasn’t the ocean: the ocean is nearly trivial, nothing but the same water expanse, deep and swarmed with boats and monsters in equal measure… he, on the other hand, was aware of being a snowflake to admire in the air of May.  
The snow fallen in that particular month sounds like a blessing, an event so much unreal that it seems even too much beautiful to be appreciated in its entirety.  
Andy knew he was one of a kind but, in the urge of counting the different crystals that composed him, he had maybe forgotten an important thing: the ocean, in its triviality, remains unchanged in the course of time… the snowflake, in May, is destined to fight a worthless war against the mud that, sooner or later, will consume it. 

****_And the doors are open now as the bells are ringing out_  
'Cause the man of the hour is taking his final bow  
Goodbye for now 

The last show he had put on was the memorial of the 24th March 1990: from what people have told him, Eddie knows that something in large scale had been arranged to pay homage to Andy and the huge impact he had had on hundreds of young people of Seattle and surroundings.  
The Paramount Theatre had been booked and filled with representatives of the local music scene – Wood’s friends in the majority – besides some relatives and a lot of Mother Love Bone fans, each one with his candle grasped in his hands and the heart forced for the first time to be a deep shaft, full to the brim with tar and grief.  
However that may be, Andy would have simply let out an enthusiast shriek if only he had seen his name and the birth and decease dates tower over with pride at the entrance of the building, as if they were the sign of a successful musical… Eddie knows this in his heart, _and nobody has ever told him_.

**_Nature has its own religion, gospel from the land_ **

The secret of surf, as the one that lies at the base of life, only consists in giving Nature the time that it needs: if the man is in such a hurry to enjoy himself, has yearning for absorbing to the core all that the universe has to offer him, the latter will do nothing but slowing down its course and leaving him empty-handed.  
Maybe Andy had understood that too, before leaving everybody with a last coup de théâtre, the cruelest and most effective he could have ever thought up… or maybe he was still searching for it, who knows.  
Eddie likes to believe that someday they will have the opportunity to confront each other, settling thus the certain differences able to distance them and strengthening with greater energy the opinions that somehow they would share.

**_Father ruled by long division, young men they pretend  
Old men comprehend_ **

Actually, Eddie feels Andy a bit close to him also because they both haven’t been very lucky in the familiar sphere: one has never known his real father, the other had better have had nothing to do with his own… they had literally spent their youths looking for themselves or also just a meager glimmer of identity in a surname or a bit of white greasepaint, and Eddie regrets the fact that he can’t ask Andy if this search, at the end, has really born him some fruits.  
_It would have been good growing old together… maybe we could have understood one another and tried to explain ourselves to each other, both book and reader.  
Both old and gnarled, but_ alive.

**_And the sky breaks at dawn, shedding light upon this town  
They'll all come 'round_ **

The tip of the marker covers a brief and quick way for three of four times, making disappear the title of a song that Eddie has written a short while ago and that hasn’t convinced him through and through: meanwhile outside it’s raining and people have started to get in line, the tickets grasped in their hands and the pre-concert anxiety that champs at the bit.  
Eddie broods over the setlist, lightly nibbles the marker cap and slightly tilts the head to see if, from a different point of view, the setlist could finally sit well for him.  
There’s nothing to do about it: creating an impressive setlist – a honest one – always turns out to be one of the most difficult tasks which are up to him.  
You should start with a bang, then insert some softer pieces and, when the public least expects that, hit the gas with impetuosity and throw the biggest hits in the setlist… and you should also be able to handle the _pearls_ , the unexpected little gifts that the spectator, unconsciously, always waits for.  
It doesn’t care if they’re covers or songs that the band hasn’t played for years and that will give Stone an excellent reason to grumble in the backstage: _the basic concept is giving yourself, always and in any case_.

When Eddie has concluded the setlist and has finally been able to lift up his gaze from the page, the rain has ceased to fall since a while.  
Now he can go out to smoke a cigarette in secret, while people carry on flowing into the KeyArena with the impetuousness and the liveliness that notoriously distinguish Pearl Jam fans.  
Eddie smiles to himself: they’re here for them… _they’re here for_ him.

**_'Cause the man of the hour is taking his final bow  
Goodbye for now_ **

Eddie takes a long sip from the bottle of wine and casts a quick look over the setlist paper, not so far from his feet: the moment has come.  
He exchanges a meaningful gesture with Jeff and Stone and, when Boom’s hands begin to gently press on the piano keys, the audience explodes in a roar.  
Then it’s only applauses, enthusiastic shouts and eyes bright with tears in the first rows; Eddie knows that they aren’t the only ones to be touched: he himself has got his voice trembling and the knuckles almost pale, but it’s a good feeling anyway.

****_And the road the old man paved_  
The broken seams along the way  
The rusted signs, left just for me 

Since he has become part of Pearl Jam, Eddie has always compared himself to Andy: after all, doing that has been pretty much inevitable.  
He was nothing but the newbie, the one who used to hang on to the microphone and hide himself behind the disheveled curls, trying to bear with difficulty the weight of a legacy that had unexpectedly landed on him, and maybe also too soon.  
He has often asked himself what Seattle could have thought – the common people, the local musicians, even the streets – when it had been forced to trade Andy with him: had letting go all of a sudden that blond pixie, so much irreverent and cheeky and wonderfully eccentric, to find in his stead a reserved guy, detached and incessantly pissed off with the world had really been a good deal? 

Eddie had asked for some live recordings of Mother Love Bone: he had secretly studied those video tapes, and found himself inevitably captured by Andy’s charisma and his vitality, qualities that, over the years, he himself had been able to endorse and control with confidence.  
Besides, he knew that his own fate was unavoidably destined to be strictly intertwined with Andy’s one: it was hard to admit but, where one was, the other couldn’t stay.  
Eddie has always regretted not being able to share some experiences with Andy, but he has never made up his mind to openly express those thoughts; it’s just a thing between the two of them, Stone and Jeff would understand him.  
After all it’s been like being a wanderer lost through the mist, the rain and the scraped walls of the city: Andy has been the guiding light that, somehow, has guided him through all that tangle of hair in the wind, electric cables and mold… Andy is _the road_ , studded with worn signals rusted by the time, but still there, standing in spite of everything.

**_He was guiding me, love, his own way_ **

Eddie closes his eyes and lets the audience sing in his place, while the words linger in the KeyArena like vivid and tangible presences.  
“ _This is my kinda love, it's the kind that moves on, it's the kind that leaves me alone_ …” everybody sings out loud, while Jeff and Stone join the choruses and smile in a satisfied way.

Soon after Eddie opens his eyes again and, next to him, glimpses a head of blonde hair shining under the reflectors, the huge leprechaun hat, familiar starry tights and the half mic stand grabbed fearlessly.  
Andy gives him a wink and goes near him, then he points out the page on the ground: in the upper right of it, beside the quick sketch of a wave, a stylized snowflake and their initials have appeared, intertwined as the most obstinate of the ivies.  
The corners of Eddie’s mouth softly lift up, until the other man gives him a bow and the shadow of a smile; the man of the hour offers himself to the audience for the last time, after which he returns to linger in the air as a web of ice and crystals, while, not so far, the ocean keeps on lapping and enveloping him and thousands of other faces with its calm waves. 

****_Now the man of the hour is taking his final bow_  
As the curtain comes down  
I feel that this is just goodbye for now 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope this translation isn't too bad: I did my best to write something about Andy Wood, and I hope to have succedeed in doing this.
> 
> -The fanfiction’s title is the same of the Pearl Jam song (which is also quoted over the fanfiction)


End file.
